How do you keep on going when all you want to do is your art, and you hear the word no more than the word yes?
I’m going to Scotland for the first time ever this year, and I’m curious about your experience as a Black woman in the UK. What do you miss? What do you not miss? What do you love about living in Brooklyn?
Where family therapy is impossible, what things feel like / are like family therapy for you? -from a black-immigrant 20-smthn femme
Hi! I’m currently studying to become a lawyer, even though I’m convicted about my calling as a storyteller. How can I navigate disappointing my parents by obeying destiny? Also, how do I take active steps towards this destiny? Do I go back to school to be better, or do I just continue to read and write? Thank you!
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How do you keep on going when all you want to do is your art, and you hear the word no more than the word yes?
Oh God, I don’t know. Well… actually, nah, I don’t know. You have to find a way to keep making the process interesting. Mine tends to be linked to being inside the work and finding fun things about the work because the pitching/ selling/ procuring/ auditioning part can be so thankless. Look for new ways to make your art that are not so obvious. There are so many days when I feel the things I am trying to get done are mountains, and everything’s one hundred slower than I would like, and no one understands the vision, and maybe I will Never Truly Do This, and I need more help, and people like me are still not getting to make/finance the work that they want, and you have to be in a weird assembly line to get picked for the thing and so on and so forth. While I wait for the things that are out of my control (agent stuff, production, someone in a glass building saying yes), I look for the things that are inside my control and pour my love into each endeavour (self-publishing online or otherwise, shows, readings, mentoring) because somewhere in all of this, I still love ‘going’, and I am weirdly addicted to ‘going’ and I find strategising very sexy indeed, and sometimes when I’m not in survival mode, it can actually be kind of rewarding. To be honest with you, even if I wanted to stop, I wouldn’t know how because it is so interlinked with my life as a human, artist, learner of things, creator, woman, poet, person of the earth.
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